How To Install Historical Versions Of WordPress

We thought it’d be fun to take a tour through the past versions of WordPress during Seattle’s wp10 party, so we came up with a convenient way for ourselves and others to do that.

If you want to jump right in, you can download WP Archive and follow the instructions to get started, or read on for more details.

The setup is built on top of a project called Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV), which uses Vagrant and VirtualBox to easily create WordPress development environments on your local machine, and then automatically provision them with all the applications, configuration and data you want.

We’ve setup our own configuration built on top of VVV that comes bundled with all of the major releases of WordPress, going all the way back to the initial release, 0.71-gold.

Once you’ve downloaded our fork of VVV and followed the setup instructions, you’ll be able to browse to http://wp-archive.local (which will be running off your local machine).

All the major releases of WordPress have already been installed, and you can login with the username “admin” and the password “password”. You can create posts, upload media, switch themes, update settings, and explore all the other features that shipped with each version.

We did have to make a few minor modifications to get the really old versions running, so if you’re curious about that kind of thing you can check out the commit history on GitHub.

If you’d like to install it for yourself, you can find everything, along with installation instructions, at the WP Archive repository on GitHub.

What do you think about how WordPress has evolved over the past 10 years? What strikes you the most about the differences between the older versions and what we have today? Share your thoughts in the comments below.